CLAUDE DALLAS ENTERED the high desert of Idaho and Nevada the way many mountain men had—18 years old and as shy as he was green, holding close to him myths of the raw West. In 1980 he had reached the age of 30, and he was no longer young. His beard had grown full, and after one grueling winter alone in the desert, he kept his brown hair long and tied in a ponytail. He had become a good horseman and a crack shot, and was learning skills that would help him survive on his own deep in the wilderness, the tricks of trapping bobcat and coyote. Later, after it was all over—the allegations of murder, Dallas's disappearance, and the futile manhunt—one friend would lament, "Claude was born 150 years too late."

For a while the sheriff's office received word of five or six Dallas sightings a day, enough to cause one officer to comment during the hunt, "It's a bad time to be wearing a beard." But from the outset all there was to go on was George Nielsen's testimony that Dallas had actually begun his escape at Sand Pass Road in the Bloody Run Hills. Wherever he had been dropped off, Dallas had gained nearly 30 hours head start on his pursuers in territory he knew intimately.

"I've got to believe it when they say this guy could travel 30 or 40 miles a night," Nettleton declared. "He was tough." When it became obvious within a week that Dallas was probably not in the area, the manhunt was suspended. Posters offering a $20,000 reward were later sent to law agencies across the country; reports of Dallas sightings began to pour in from almost every state. None have yet produced the suspect.

Once the manhunt was played out, the search for Bill Pogue's body became paramount. Sonar and ultrasonic devices, scuba divers, tracking dogs, psychics, grappling hooks, bulldozers, helicopters, planes, land vehicles, and nearly 200 people figured in the month-long search. Still the winter desert and mountains yielded nothing.

IN 1972 THE NATIONAL Geographic Society published a book titled The American Cowboy. The volume included two photographs of a peach-fuzzed cowhand on the Little Humboldt Ranch in Nevada; it was Claude Dallas. The author, Bart McDowell, observed in the text, "not every buckaroo can be identified here [on the Owyhee Desert]; some give spurious Social Security numbers to protect the privacy of their past." Although he was barely out of his teens, Claude seems already to have been one such mysterious character. As it turned out, he had his reasons for anonymity.

Few people knew, and no one seems to have cared, that the reclusive boy had come from the East. Born in Virginia in 1950, he was reportedly raised in New York State with four brothers, one sister, and two half-sisters. After graduating from high school in 1968 Dallas headed west, possibly thinking he had left all authority behind.

It is said that one day he just showed up on the Alvord Ranch in southeastern Oregon, carrying his bedroll and a commemorative-edition rifle. There Claude got his first taste of cowboy life. With the money he earned in Oregon, the teen-ager purchased two horses and set off somewhat quixotically to explore the withered frontier. Eventually his wanderings led to the Paradise Valley region in northern Nevada, where he led a cowboy's life, worked harvest on potato farms, dug wells, and generally paid dues. During his first year with the Quarter Circle A outfit in Nevada, Dallas hand-filed a pair of spurs and made his own chaps.

"Anybody can go down and be a cowboy," explained Sheriff Nettleton. "Thirty days with this outfit, 30 days with that outfit. Normally you put five outfits under the belt and you've done something. This guy apparently worked for upwards of 20 or 30 of them. He earned a reputation for being a hard-working loner type. . .clean, neat, and polite."

In 1973 Claude's idyll was shattered. The FBI tracked him down and arrested him for failure to appear for military induction, Dallas blamed the photographs published in The American Cowboy for his arrest, although one FBI agent denied the book led the bureau to him. He was extradited to Columbus, Ohio, where his draft board was located. Later he told friends he had spent a month in custody in Columbus and was fined before being released.

"Claude had bad feelings toward the FBI," said Irene Fischer, who first met Dallas in 1970 when she was a cook with the Quarter Circle A outfit and he was a green, shy cowhand. "Claude's father said that the FBI had harassed that family for years," Irene remembered. "They wouldn't let it rest. They hunted him until they caught him. And when the man put him on the bus back to Nevada he told him, 'Claude, I'll get you, even if it's for income tax evasion.' " Whether the FBI did or did not harass the Dallas family, Claude clearly felt harassed.

Back in Nevada, Dallas resumed the hard, plain life from which he'd been yanked. Although he was capable of discoursing on the evils of the Vietnam War and a wide range of other topics, it was the West that most interested him. Fading arts such as braiding rawhide, bottle collecting, and reloading old cartridges appealed to him, and he was fond of the paintings of Charles M. Russell, particularly a lighthearted work entitled A Bronc to Breakfast.

Sometime around 1975 Dallas started teaching himself how to trap. In recent years, when pelts began to fetch prices in the hundreds of dollars, numerous ranchers and farmers have taken up trapping, though few have done better than break even. But for Dallas trapping was not just a hobby. He considered it a basic necessity for the life he wanted to live. According to older professionals like Santy Mendieta and Frank Aramburu, Basques who have been trapping for 40 and 60 years, respectively, Dallas was only an amateur trapper. Just the same, they say, he brought in respectable pelts.

MANY LAW OFFICERS between Boise and Winnemucca have expressed concern that Dallas might be lionized by the media. Some angrily deny it, but others allow that Claude Dallas cut quite a figure—at least on the face of things. The man was devoted to a life style celebrated in fiction and film, part cowboy and pan trapper. He lived clean and simple. As Sheriff Nettleton observed, "Outside of this one small quirk, he's the kind of guy you could respect." Because of that "one small quirk," what is alleged to have been his role in the murders, Dallas is one of the most wanted men in America.

In March 1976 Dallas was cited and fined for a trapping violation near Eureka, Nevada. It is said that after that incident he added game wardens to his list of aggravations headed by the FBI. He seemed to be more and more in the habit of quietly spurning the law. The traps he set around Bull Camp last January are one example of his civil disobedience. According to the wardens who pulled them, his traps were neither tagged for identification nor gapped for eagle protection, and they were baited. In addition, although Dallas had pur- chased a nonresident trapping license for the state of Idaho, he was at least four days premature in setting out his line.

"I hunt a lot," said Dr. James Calder, a Winnemucca dentist who regularly checked Dallas's teeth. "I've come across Claude out in the desert lots of times. He has camps all over this country. As well as I know him, I always got the cold shoulder when I met him in the desert. Probably why he didn't like you coming around was he always had a deer or something he had shot out of season in his camp. There's no secret about that. He either didn't want you to see what he had shot or he didn't want you to be implicated if he got in trouble for it. I don't know which. I do know Claude believed he had a right to kill animals out of season without regard for game laws."

In the winter of 1978-79, Nevada Department of Wildlife warden Gene Weller confiscated two guns from Dallas as well as traps he believed belonged to the trapper. The peculiar circumstances of that encounter underscore the cat-and-mouse game some hunters and trappers play with game wardens and vice versa. The scenario also places Dallas's alleged statements two years later at Bull Camp in illuminating context.

Late one afternoon, during a routine check of trap lines in a canyon of the Bloody Run Hills, Weller came across a number of baited— and therefore illegal—sets. Because of the location of the traps and the lateness of the hour, Weller decided against waiting for the owner of the traps; he instead confiscated them. The warden left his business card and a note stating why the traps had been seized and who to contact. Early the next morning, as Weller was returning to the canyon,

he saw a red jeep moving toward the canyon mouth. He parked his truck in an arroyo and waited until the driver had departed on foot up the canyon, then drove closer and prepared for a rare event—an arrest of a violator caught red-handed.

"I waited all day," Weller said. "I waited and waited. It was in the winter and the canyon was slipperier than all get-out, and I thought, finally. This guy has slipped and broken his leg. By then it was dark. I called for a sheriffs backup and got a couple of deputies.

"The three of us went up. One of the deputies checked the jeep and found a rifle. He told me it was loaded, with an unexpended [therefore illegal] round in the chamber. We went up the canyon.

"Well, I tracked him in the frozen snow, tracked him to the first trap site, and my business card, which I'd hung on a bait wire, was gone. At this point I circled around with a flashlight. There was another set of tracks coming down, but not on the trail. So 1 tracked these; finally the tracks went up a side hill and I lost the track. . . .1 later found out that he was in fact sitting on the mountain watching me watch for him. He was probably, chuckling the whole time. In retrospect, he could have blown me away at any time that day."

The three officers retreated to their vehicles, confiscated the rifle and a pistol from the jeep, and left. After a few days Dallas appeared at the county courthouse to claim the confiscated guns. He denied that the traps had been his or that the rifle had been loaded. Weller had no evidence that connected Dallas with the traps, and when the deputy who'd opened the rifle was questioned about it, he declined to swear under oath that the round had been a live one. Weller could do nothing but sign the guns over to Dallas. It may have been this incident that Dallas had in mind on January 5, when he allegedly informed Bill Pogue that he would deny the charges if taken to court.

There was another significant postscript to Weller's encounter with Dallas. He remembers, "[Claude] told me, 'You are welcome in my camp.' His camp was very important to him, I found out later. 'But,' he said, 'leave your badge outside.' And 1 told him, 'Claude, 1 can't leave my badge outside.' And he said, 'Well, don't come into my camp, then.'"

This sentiment may illustrate Dallas's distaste for authority, but it explains nothing about the greatest mystery of all: if Jim Stevens's eyewitness account is accurate, why did Dallas drive 70 miles out of the wilderness to dispose of Pogue's body? He had failed to haul the corpse of Conley Elms up to the rim and must have known that the body would not disappear in the waist-deep, slow-moving waters of the Owyhee. With his plan for hiding both bodies ruined, why would he then have driven back to civilization to bury Pogue?

Irene Fischer may have come close to explaining the mystery. "There's still this horrible feeling of why, what was Claude's idea to bring Pogue's body in here," she said. "He was so angry at Pogue that he was just going to make sure that man was never found."

WE'RE CALLED CONSERVATION officers," says Michael Elms. A stocky, bearded man, Elms knew both murder victims well—one was his "little brother" and the other "a very, very close friend." Had he not been ill the day before the shootings, Michael Elms would have been at Bull Camp instead of his brother. Jazz plays softly on his living room radio as he talks about his job. The books on his shelves include a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog and a multi-volume set of The Classics of Philosophy.

"We check hunters and fishermen, trespassers, rustlers. We do quite a bit of public speaking. We're on call for helping with different law enforcement agencies and whatever biological work the department wants us to do. Almost all of us have got at least bachelor of science degrees, quite a number have master's, and there's several Ph.D.'s walking around." Idaho conservation officers earn roughly (1600 per month, and each senior officer is responsible for some 1200 square miles of state, federal, and private land. Their mission is to manage a walking, eating, renewable resource—the stare's wildlife. Because of the nature of their responsibilities, conservation officers must deal with outdoorsmen, most of whom carry guns and a few of whom have no desire to see the law nosing around their campsites.

"We go out and find even fishermen carrying guns and big knives," Elms says. "It's sort of a Wild West syndrome. For example, we have an air force base down the road here [Mountain Home Air Force Base]. As soon as they hit the base some of the men go out and buy a gun, a big knife, and a couple of bandoleers and head out into the hills." One ten-year study conducted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department showed that a game warden has roughly seven times the chance or being shot at or threatened with a gun as a regular peace officer and almost nine times as great a chance of dying if assaulted.

Much of the job's danger stems from the marginal communications between officers and the distances that often separate wardens from one another. And yet the inherent danger does not appear to have caused any paranoia among Idaho's game wardens—even after the Bull Camp shootings. Dale Baird, chief of law enforcement in the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, explains, "Privately and around campfircs over the years, we've all said that sometime it's going to happen to one of us—just hope it isn't going to be me. So while [the double murder] was a shock, it wasn't a total surprise. You worry about these things, but you can't worry too much or you wouldn't go."

Conley Elms had Struggled for years to obtain his job with Idaho Fish and Game, working at odd jobs and as a part-time biological aide with the department until he was hired as a conservation officer in 1977. He and Michael had grown up on a small ranch near Beaver Marsh, Oregon (population 20 or less), and for four years before his murder Conley and his brother had shared the same occupation with great satisfaction. From all accounts Conley was a man at peace with himself. His main passion was a quiet one—fly fishing. At the time of his death at age 33, he and his wife, Sheryl, were in the final stage of adopting a baby from India.

Comments from various Idaho Fish and Game officers give the impression that Conley Elms was less likely to have been a party to a conflict with Dallas than Bill Pogue. This is not to say that Pogue was responsible for the alleged confrontation, but Elms was probably less threatening to Dallas.

"Bill Pogue was difficult to get to know," says Jerry Thiessen, big-game manager with Idaho Fish and Game and one of Pogue's closest friends. "It rook me six or eight years.... Bill and I would go down to Owyhee County and do what buddies do—look for arrowheads, cook a steak. We built a relationship and a rapport with Owyhee County. He was gentle, he was kind.

"But he had an air about himself that represented authority, even without his uniform on. He had little time for idle chitchat with people he didn't know well. I wouldn't say he was brusque, but he was sometimes short with people. Bill believed you shouldn't dillydally around. If you're not going to enforce the law, don't have the law."

Pogue was a lawman, and most people seern to remember him as such. Thiessen says, "When Bill walked up to you, there was no question in your mind that he represented the law." Pogue's stare, especially intense as the result of an accident to his right eye, made his presence keenly felt. "People remembered that he'd looked at them," says Thiessen. "There wasn't any way you were going to forget the man."

Dr. Calder agrees. "Bill was a tough law officer," he says, "but you've got to be tough around here. He was stern with poachers, people ripping off the wild game." But beneath Pogue's icy demeanor was a warm humor. Having spent part of his life in bunkhouses with cowboys and years as a student of the early mountain men, Pogue admired much the same western period and life Style that Dallas did. In 1964, when he first arrived in Garden Valley, Idaho, to take a job with Idaho Fish and Game, Pogue moved his family into a log cabin. His love of nature and regard for history surfaced most articulately in his artwork. He was a photographer who favored river otters and hummingbirds as subjects. But it was his sketches and paintings that most vividly revealed the inner man.

Pogue's personal favorite was entitled Mountain Man. In this drawing a bright-eyed, bearded character softly touches a single strand of barbed wire, gazing with innocent resignation at the near side of civilization. Inasmuch as Pogue himself accepted civilization and its restricting barbed wire, Mountain Man may have been a self-portrait of sons. It expresses a deeply felt sympathy for the trappers and frontier recluses who fell before the changing times. Except for the resignation in the mountain man's eyes, the drawing could also have been a portrait of Claude Dallas.

In the menagerie of characters Pogue drew, one figure resembles his alleged murderer more closely still. The Trapper depicts a fierce, bearded hunter straddling a dead wolf. Trap in one hand, walking stick in the other, the man in this drawing is clearly defiant, not resigned to the viewer's trespass. Drawn a year before the shootings, the work seems to have presaged the persona Pogue and Elms last encountered.

TO SOME IT WOULD seem that Claude Dallas is a man of almost legendary proportions. The stage is certainly set in his favor: his story brings elements of the western myth—wilderness, solitude, and violence—together. There have even been reports that some people applauded the murders. But Santy Mendieta summarizes a more general feeling among locals when he observes, "It's a sad thing. You can't make a hero out of either of them. What brought it about was that the one was going to drag the other into Boise, or wherever, handcuffed and hogtied. And the other man just wasn't going to go—and he didn't. From what I hear and from what I knew of them, they being the two men they were, [they] would have had the same trouble right out here on the street."

In Idaho capital punishment is now administered by lethal injection, and several law officers have expressed angry hope that Claude Dallas will be the first guinea pig for the new technique. The murders have torn holes in the lives of the victims' families and friends; they wait for the day of justice. But the questions raised by the tragedy have also caused deep anguish for Dallas's closest friends.

"These law boys had a chance to use what I call appropriate common sense," explains Cortland Nielsen, brother of George Nielsen. "They didn't have to push Claude. They could have told him in a right way that someone had reported him. People talk bad about him, but Claude wasn't the sort to waste deer meat."

Nielsen remembers Dallas back when he was a teen-ager beginning the horseback circuit of Nevada that led him. 11 years later, to Bull Camp on the Owyhee. He searches for some negative quality in the boy he watched grow into a man, something that might demonstrate that, even at his worst, Dallas was better than most.

"The only thing wrong with him," he says, pausing, "he let his hair grow. But in this book here, the Bible, it says that long hair is a woman's beauty and it's filth on a man. I told him so, too." Nielsen drops into silence and gropes for a different thought. Almost wish- fully he suddenly booms, "I'm confident Claude is traveling around the world and getting along fine." He falters. "Bur then he's got a conscience, too. So finally it'll hit him too much someday. Then he'll figure a way to get lost and that'll be the end. No one will ever see him again." Nielsen stops, disturbed by the idea he has just ex- pressed. Outside his window enormous winds rip at the topsoil of the solitary ranches perched up and down the valley.

"The only way that he could ever get back, that people will ever see him again, would be if the people [the law] let it be known that. ..that. . .but, see... you can't excuse, you can't. . .it's so tough." At last he concludes, "I just don't know how to call it. I wrote a letter to Norman Vincent Peale to find out right from wrong, what should be done if I ever see Claude, say in Portland or Calcutta next Sunday, other than tell him to pray or turn himself in. I don't know. It's really tough."

Not far down the road from Nielsen lives Dallas's old friend, Irene Fischer. The winter she and Claude worked the Circle A together, Irene and her husband, Walt, gave the lone boy presents and a Christmas meal when all the other hands had departed for the holiday. Now she mourns Claude, almost as if he were a dead younger brother. Her scrapbook contains some of the few photographs in which Dallas ever appeared, and pictures taken for The American Cowboy hang in her home.

During the past few months Fischer has sketched an exquisite fantasy of the moment of the alleged murders. Behind Dallas is a hazy rendition of a western saloon. Buildings and skyscrapers, the urban landscape Dallas repudiated, loom even deeper in the background, tucked in some narrow alley of the trapper's psyche. The romanticized periphery is balanced by the event taking place in the work and the realism of the desert floor in the foreground. In the sketch Dallas is shooting a lawman. Such is the nightmare within the dream.

"I'm very sorry for what he done," Fischer says, "sorry because we'll never see him again. I hope he never gets caught for the simple reason I don't think Claude will ever be taken alive. I wouldn't want him to kill anyone else, and I wouldn't want them to kill him. And I wouldn't want him to end up killing himself. He did make a remark to a friend that if he was caught he'd shoot it out, and that if it got down to his last shell he'd shoot himself before he'd be taken."

That sentiment is less painful to her than another, more personal one, though. Despite her anger at the law for its determined pursuit of Claude Dallas, Fischer has had to compose her own answer to a question that haunts her: what would she have done if this friend of years had arrived at her house with the blood of two dead men on him?

"I've laid awake at night and thought about it," she sighs. "Claude was a dear friend, and I've really had to look inside myself. And I honestly believe that I would have been in my right mind. . .I'm so dead set against. . ." She halts and would rather not say it. "I couldn't have helped Claude. . . .His destiny is in the hands of God now."

CLAUDE DALLAS ENTERED the high desert of Idaho and Nevada the way many mountain men had—18 years old and as shy as he was green, holding close to him myths of the raw West. In 1980 he had reached the age of 30, and he was no longer young. His beard had grown full, and after one grueling winter alone in the desert, he kept his brown hair long and tied in a ponytail. He had become a good horseman and a crack shot, and was learning skills that would help him survive on his own deep in the wilderness, the tricks of trapping bobcat and coyote. Later, after it was all over—the allegations of murder, Dallas's disappearance, and the futile manhunt—one friend would lament, "Claude was born 150 years too late."

For a while the sheriff's office received word of five or six Dallas sightings a day, enough to cause one officer to comment during the hunt, "It's a bad time to be wearing a beard." But from the outset all there was to go on was George Nielsen's testimony that Dallas had actually begun his escape at Sand Pass Road in the Bloody Run Hills. Wherever he had been dropped off, Dallas had gained nearly 30 hours head start on his pursuers in territory he knew intimately.

"I've got to believe it when they say this guy could travel 30 or 40 miles a night," Nettleton declared. "He was tough." When it became obvious within a week that Dallas was probably not in the area, the manhunt was suspended. Posters offering a $20,000 reward were later sent to law agencies across the country; reports of Dallas sightings began to pour in from almost every state. None have yet produced the suspect.

Once the manhunt was played out, the search for Bill Pogue's body became paramount. Sonar and ultrasonic devices, scuba divers, tracking dogs, psychics, grappling hooks, bulldozers, helicopters, planes, land vehicles, and nearly 200 people figured in the month-long search. Still the winter desert and mountains yielded nothing.

IN 1972 THE NATIONAL Geographic Society published a book titled The American Cowboy. The volume included two photographs of a peach-fuzzed cowhand on the Little Humboldt Ranch in Nevada; it was Claude Dallas. The author, Bart McDowell, observed in the text, "not every buckaroo can be identified here [on the Owyhee Desert]; some give spurious Social Security numbers to protect the privacy of their past." Although he was barely out of his teens, Claude seems already to have been one such mysterious character. As it turned out, he had his reasons for anonymity.

Few people knew, and no one seems to have cared, that the reclusive boy had come from the East. Born in Virginia in 1950, he was reportedly raised in New York State with four brothers, one sister, and two half-sisters. After graduating from high school in 1968 Dallas headed west, possibly thinking he had left all authority behind.

It is said that one day he just showed up on the Alvord Ranch in southeastern Oregon, carrying his bedroll and a commemorative-edition rifle. There Claude got his first taste of cowboy life. With the money he earned in Oregon, the teen-ager purchased two horses and set off somewhat quixotically to explore the withered frontier. Eventually his wanderings led to the Paradise Valley region in northern Nevada, where he led a cowboy's life, worked harvest on potato farms, dug wells, and generally paid dues. During his first year with the Quarter Circle A outfit in Nevada, Dallas hand-filed a pair of spurs and made his own chaps.

"Anybody can go down and be a cowboy," explained Sheriff Nettleton. "Thirty days with this outfit, 30 days with that outfit. Normally you put five outfits under the belt and you've done something. This guy apparently worked for upwards of 20 or 30 of them. He earned a reputation for being a hard-working loner type. . .clean, neat, and polite."

In 1973 Claude's idyll was shattered. The FBI tracked him down and arrested him for failure to appear for military induction, Dallas blamed the photographs published in The American Cowboy for his arrest, although one FBI agent denied the book led the bureau to him. He was extradited to Columbus, Ohio, where his draft board was located. Later he told friends he had spent a month in custody in Columbus and was fined before being released.

"Claude had bad feelings toward the FBI," said Irene Fischer, who first met Dallas in 1970 when she was a cook with the Quarter Circle A outfit and he was a green, shy cowhand. "Claude's father said that the FBI had harassed that family for years," Irene remembered. "They wouldn't let it rest. They hunted him until they caught him. And when the man put him on the bus back to Nevada he told him, 'Claude, I'll get you, even if it's for income tax evasion.' " Whether the FBI did or did not harass the Dallas family, Claude clearly felt harassed.

Back in Nevada, Dallas resumed the hard, plain life from which he'd been yanked. Although he was capable of discoursing on the evils of the Vietnam War and a wide range of other topics, it was the West that most interested him. Fading arts such as braiding rawhide, bottle collecting, and reloading old cartridges appealed to him, and he was fond of the paintings of Charles M. Russell, particularly a lighthearted work entitled A Bronc to Breakfast.

Sometime around 1975 Dallas started teaching himself how to trap. In recent years, when pelts began to fetch prices in the hundreds of dollars, numerous ranchers and farmers have taken up trapping, though few have done better than break even. But for Dallas trapping was not just a hobby. He considered it a basic necessity for the life he wanted to live. According to older professionals like Santy Mendieta and Frank Aramburu, Basques who have been trapping for 40 and 60 years, respectively, Dallas was only an amateur trapper. Just the same, they say, he brought in respectable pelts.

MANY LAW OFFICERS between Boise and Winnemucca have expressed concern that Dallas might be lionized by the media. Some angrily deny it, but others allow that Claude Dallas cut quite a figure—at least on the face of things. The man was devoted to a life style celebrated in fiction and film, part cowboy and pan trapper. He lived clean and simple. As Sheriff Nettleton observed, "Outside of this one small quirk, he's the kind of guy you could respect." Because of that "one small quirk," what is alleged to have been his role in the murders, Dallas is one of the most wanted men in America.

In March 1976 Dallas was cited and fined for a trapping violation near Eureka, Nevada. It is said that after that incident he added game wardens to his list of aggravations headed by the FBI. He seemed to be more and more in the habit of quietly spurning the law. The traps he set around Bull Camp last January are one example of his civil disobedience. According to the wardens who pulled them, his traps were neither tagged for identification nor gapped for eagle protection, and they were baited. In addition, although Dallas had pur- chased a nonresident trapping license for the state of Idaho, he was at least four days premature in setting out his line.

"I hunt a lot," said Dr. James Calder, a Winnemucca dentist who regularly checked Dallas's teeth. "I've come across Claude out in the desert lots of times. He has camps all over this country. As well as I know him, I always got the cold shoulder when I met him in the desert. Probably why he didn't like you coming around was he always had a deer or something he had shot out of season in his camp. There's no secret about that. He either didn't want you to see what he had shot or he didn't want you to be implicated if he got in trouble for it. I don't know which. I do know Claude believed he had a right to kill animals out of season without regard for game laws."

In the winter of 1978-79, Nevada Department of Wildlife warden Gene Weller confiscated two guns from Dallas as well as traps he believed belonged to the trapper. The peculiar circumstances of that encounter underscore the cat-and-mouse game some hunters and trappers play with game wardens and vice versa. The scenario also places Dallas's alleged statements two years later at Bull Camp in illuminating context.

Late one afternoon, during a routine check of trap lines in a canyon of the Bloody Run Hills, Weller came across a number of baited— and therefore illegal—sets. Because of the location of the traps and the lateness of the hour, Weller decided against waiting for the owner of the traps; he instead confiscated them. The warden left his business card and a note stating why the traps had been seized and who to contact. Early the next morning, as Weller was returning to the canyon,

he saw a red jeep moving toward the canyon mouth. He parked his truck in an arroyo and waited until the driver had departed on foot up the canyon, then drove closer and prepared for a rare event—an arrest of a violator caught red-handed.

"I waited all day," Weller said. "I waited and waited. It was in the winter and the canyon was slipperier than all get-out, and I thought, finally. This guy has slipped and broken his leg. By then it was dark. I called for a sheriffs backup and got a couple of deputies.

"The three of us went up. One of the deputies checked the jeep and found a rifle. He told me it was loaded, with an unexpended [therefore illegal] round in the chamber. We went up the canyon.

"Well, I tracked him in the frozen snow, tracked him to the first trap site, and my business card, which I'd hung on a bait wire, was gone. At this point I circled around with a flashlight. There was another set of tracks coming down, but not on the trail. So 1 tracked these; finally the tracks went up a side hill and I lost the track. . . .1 later found out that he was in fact sitting on the mountain watching me watch for him. He was probably, chuckling the whole time. In retrospect, he could have blown me away at any time that day."

The three officers retreated to their vehicles, confiscated the rifle and a pistol from the jeep, and left. After a few days Dallas appeared at the county courthouse to claim the confiscated guns. He denied that the traps had been his or that the rifle had been loaded. Weller had no evidence that connected Dallas with the traps, and when the deputy who'd opened the rifle was questioned about it, he declined to swear under oath that the round had been a live one. Weller could do nothing but sign the guns over to Dallas. It may have been this incident that Dallas had in mind on January 5, when he allegedly informed Bill Pogue that he would deny the charges if taken to court.

There was another significant postscript to Weller's encounter with Dallas. He remembers, "[Claude] told me, 'You are welcome in my camp.' His camp was very important to him, I found out later. 'But,' he said, 'leave your badge outside.' And 1 told him, 'Claude, 1 can't leave my badge outside.' And he said, 'Well, don't come into my camp, then.'"

This sentiment may illustrate Dallas's distaste for authority, but it explains nothing about the greatest mystery of all: if Jim Stevens's eyewitness account is accurate, why did Dallas drive 70 miles out of the wilderness to dispose of Pogue's body? He had failed to haul the corpse of Conley Elms up to the rim and must have known that the body would not disappear in the waist-deep, slow-moving waters of the Owyhee. With his plan for hiding both bodies ruined, why would he then have driven back to civilization to bury Pogue?

Irene Fischer may have come close to explaining the mystery. "There's still this horrible feeling of why, what was Claude's idea to bring Pogue's body in here," she said. "He was so angry at Pogue that he was just going to make sure that man was never found."

WE'RE CALLED CONSERVATION officers," says Michael Elms. A stocky, bearded man, Elms knew both murder victims well—one was his "little brother" and the other "a very, very close friend." Had he not been ill the day before the shootings, Michael Elms would have been at Bull Camp instead of his brother. Jazz plays softly on his living room radio as he talks about his job. The books on his shelves include a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog and a multi-volume set of The Classics of Philosophy.

"We check hunters and fishermen, trespassers, rustlers. We do quite a bit of public speaking. We're on call for helping with different law enforcement agencies and whatever biological work the department wants us to do. Almost all of us have got at least bachelor of science degrees, quite a number have master's, and there's several Ph.D.'s walking around." Idaho conservation officers earn roughly (1600 per month, and each senior officer is responsible for some 1200 square miles of state, federal, and private land. Their mission is to manage a walking, eating, renewable resource—the stare's wildlife. Because of the nature of their responsibilities, conservation officers must deal with outdoorsmen, most of whom carry guns and a few of whom have no desire to see the law nosing around their campsites.

"We go out and find even fishermen carrying guns and big knives," Elms says. "It's sort of a Wild West syndrome. For example, we have an air force base down the road here [Mountain Home Air Force Base]. As soon as they hit the base some of the men go out and buy a gun, a big knife, and a couple of bandoleers and head out into the hills." One ten-year study conducted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department showed that a game warden has roughly seven times the chance or being shot at or threatened with a gun as a regular peace officer and almost nine times as great a chance of dying if assaulted.

Much of the job's danger stems from the marginal communications between officers and the distances that often separate wardens from one another. And yet the inherent danger does not appear to have caused any paranoia among Idaho's game wardens—even after the Bull Camp shootings. Dale Baird, chief of law enforcement in the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, explains, "Privately and around campfircs over the years, we've all said that sometime it's going to happen to one of us—just hope it isn't going to be me. So while [the double murder] was a shock, it wasn't a total surprise. You worry about these things, but you can't worry too much or you wouldn't go."

Conley Elms had Struggled for years to obtain his job with Idaho Fish and Game, working at odd jobs and as a part-time biological aide with the department until he was hired as a conservation officer in 1977. He and Michael had grown up on a small ranch near Beaver Marsh, Oregon (population 20 or less), and for four years before his murder Conley and his brother had shared the same occupation with great satisfaction. From all accounts Conley was a man at peace with himself. His main passion was a quiet one—fly fishing. At the time of his death at age 33, he and his wife, Sheryl, were in the final stage of adopting a baby from India.

Comments from various Idaho Fish and Game officers give the impression that Conley Elms was less likely to have been a party to a conflict with Dallas than Bill Pogue. This is not to say that Pogue was responsible for the alleged confrontation, but Elms was probably less threatening to Dallas.

"Bill Pogue was difficult to get to know," says Jerry Thiessen, big-game manager with Idaho Fish and Game and one of Pogue's closest friends. "It rook me six or eight years.... Bill and I would go down to Owyhee County and do what buddies do—look for arrowheads, cook a steak. We built a relationship and a rapport with Owyhee County. He was gentle, he was kind.

"But he had an air about himself that represented authority, even without his uniform on. He had little time for idle chitchat with people he didn't know well. I wouldn't say he was brusque, but he was sometimes short with people. Bill believed you shouldn't dillydally around. If you're not going to enforce the law, don't have the law."

Pogue was a lawman, and most people seern to remember him as such. Thiessen says, "When Bill walked up to you, there was no question in your mind that he represented the law." Pogue's stare, especially intense as the result of an accident to his right eye, made his presence keenly felt. "People remembered that he'd looked at them," says Thiessen. "There wasn't any way you were going to forget the man."

Dr. Calder agrees. "Bill was a tough law officer," he says, "but you've got to be tough around here. He was stern with poachers, people ripping off the wild game." But beneath Pogue's icy demeanor was a warm humor. Having spent part of his life in bunkhouses with cowboys and years as a student of the early mountain men, Pogue admired much the same western period and life Style that Dallas did. In 1964, when he first arrived in Garden Valley, Idaho, to take a job with Idaho Fish and Game, Pogue moved his family into a log cabin. His love of nature and regard for history surfaced most articulately in his artwork. He was a photographer who favored river otters and hummingbirds as subjects. But it was his sketches and paintings that most vividly revealed the inner man.

Pogue's personal favorite was entitled Mountain Man. In this drawing a bright-eyed, bearded character softly touches a single strand of barbed wire, gazing with innocent resignation at the near side of civilization. Inasmuch as Pogue himself accepted civilization and its restricting barbed wire, Mountain Man may have been a self-portrait of sons. It expresses a deeply felt sympathy for the trappers and frontier recluses who fell before the changing times. Except for the resignation in the mountain man's eyes, the drawing could also have been a portrait of Claude Dallas.

In the menagerie of characters Pogue drew, one figure resembles his alleged murderer more closely still. The Trapper depicts a fierce, bearded hunter straddling a dead wolf. Trap in one hand, walking stick in the other, the man in this drawing is clearly defiant, not resigned to the viewer's trespass. Drawn a year before the shootings, the work seems to have presaged the persona Pogue and Elms last encountered.

TO SOME IT WOULD seem that Claude Dallas is a man of almost legendary proportions. The stage is certainly set in his favor: his story brings elements of the western myth—wilderness, solitude, and violence—together. There have even been reports that some people applauded the murders. But Santy Mendieta summarizes a more general feeling among locals when he observes, "It's a sad thing. You can't make a hero out of either of them. What brought it about was that the one was going to drag the other into Boise, or wherever, handcuffed and hogtied. And the other man just wasn't going to go—and he didn't. From what I hear and from what I knew of them, they being the two men they were, [they] would have had the same trouble right out here on the street."

In Idaho capital punishment is now administered by lethal injection, and several law officers have expressed angry hope that Claude Dallas will be the first guinea pig for the new technique. The murders have torn holes in the lives of the victims' families and friends; they wait for the day of justice. But the questions raised by the tragedy have also caused deep anguish for Dallas's closest friends.

"These law boys had a chance to use what I call appropriate common sense," explains Cortland Nielsen, brother of George Nielsen. "They didn't have to push Claude. They could have told him in a right way that someone had reported him. People talk bad about him, but Claude wasn't the sort to waste deer meat."

Nielsen remembers Dallas back when he was a teen-ager beginning the horseback circuit of Nevada that led him. 11 years later, to Bull Camp on the Owyhee. He searches for some negative quality in the boy he watched grow into a man, something that might demonstrate that, even at his worst, Dallas was better than most.

"The only thing wrong with him," he says, pausing, "he let his hair grow. But in this book here, the Bible, it says that long hair is a woman's beauty and it's filth on a man. I told him so, too." Nielsen drops into silence and gropes for a different thought. Almost wish- fully he suddenly booms, "I'm confident Claude is traveling around the world and getting along fine." He falters. "Bur then he's got a conscience, too. So finally it'll hit him too much someday. Then he'll figure a way to get lost and that'll be the end. No one will ever see him again." Nielsen stops, disturbed by the idea he has just ex- pressed. Outside his window enormous winds rip at the topsoil of the solitary ranches perched up and down the valley.

"The only way that he could ever get back, that people will ever see him again, would be if the people [the law] let it be known that. ..that. . .but, see... you can't excuse, you can't. . .it's so tough." At last he concludes, "I just don't know how to call it. I wrote a letter to Norman Vincent Peale to find out right from wrong, what should be done if I ever see Claude, say in Portland or Calcutta next Sunday, other than tell him to pray or turn himself in. I don't know. It's really tough."

Not far down the road from Nielsen lives Dallas's old friend, Irene Fischer. The winter she and Claude worked the Circle A together, Irene and her husband, Walt, gave the lone boy presents and a Christmas meal when all the other hands had departed for the holiday. Now she mourns Claude, almost as if he were a dead younger brother. Her scrapbook contains some of the few photographs in which Dallas ever appeared, and pictures taken for The American Cowboy hang in her home.

During the past few months Fischer has sketched an exquisite fantasy of the moment of the alleged murders. Behind Dallas is a hazy rendition of a western saloon. Buildings and skyscrapers, the urban landscape Dallas repudiated, loom even deeper in the background, tucked in some narrow alley of the trapper's psyche. The romanticized periphery is balanced by the event taking place in the work and the realism of the desert floor in the foreground. In the sketch Dallas is shooting a lawman. Such is the nightmare within the dream.

"I'm very sorry for what he done," Fischer says, "sorry because we'll never see him again. I hope he never gets caught for the simple reason I don't think Claude will ever be taken alive. I wouldn't want him to kill anyone else, and I wouldn't want them to kill him. And I wouldn't want him to end up killing himself. He did make a remark to a friend that if he was caught he'd shoot it out, and that if it got down to his last shell he'd shoot himself before he'd be taken."

That sentiment is less painful to her than another, more personal one, though. Despite her anger at the law for its determined pursuit of Claude Dallas, Fischer has had to compose her own answer to a question that haunts her: what would she have done if this friend of years had arrived at her house with the blood of two dead men on him?

"I've laid awake at night and thought about it," she sighs. "Claude was a dear friend, and I've really had to look inside myself. And I honestly believe that I would have been in my right mind. . .I'm so dead set against. . ." She halts and would rather not say it. "I couldn't have helped Claude. . . .His destiny is in the hands of God now."

CLAUDE DALLAS ENTERED the high desert of Idaho and Nevada the way many mountain men had—18 years old and as shy as he was green, holding close to him myths of the raw West. In 1980 he had reached the age of 30, and he was no longer young. His beard had grown full, and after one grueling winter alone in the desert, he kept his brown hair long and tied in a ponytail. He had become a good horseman and a crack shot, and was learning skills that would help him survive on his own deep in the wilderness, the tricks of trapping bobcat and coyote. Later, after it was all over—the allegations of murder, Dallas's disappearance, and the futile manhunt—one friend would lament, "Claude was born 150 years too late."

For a while the sheriff's office received word of five or six Dallas sightings a day, enough to cause one officer to comment during the hunt, "It's a bad time to be wearing a beard." But from the outset all there was to go on was George Nielsen's testimony that Dallas had actually begun his escape at Sand Pass Road in the Bloody Run Hills. Wherever he had been dropped off, Dallas had gained nearly 30 hours head start on his pursuers in territory he knew intimately.

"I've got to believe it when they say this guy could travel 30 or 40 miles a night," Nettleton declared. "He was tough." When it became obvious within a week that Dallas was probably not in the area, the manhunt was suspended. Posters offering a $20,000 reward were later sent to law agencies across the country; reports of Dallas sightings began to pour in from almost every state. None have yet produced the suspect.

Once the manhunt was played out, the search for Bill Pogue's body became paramount. Sonar and ultrasonic devices, scuba divers, tracking dogs, psychics, grappling hooks, bulldozers, helicopters, planes, land vehicles, and nearly 200 people figured in the month-long search. Still the winter desert and mountains yielded nothing.

IN 1972 THE NATIONAL Geographic Society published a book titled The American Cowboy. The volume included two photographs of a peach-fuzzed cowhand on the Little Humboldt Ranch in Nevada; it was Claude Dallas. The author, Bart McDowell, observed in the text, "not every buckaroo can be identified here [on the Owyhee Desert]; some give spurious Social Security numbers to protect the privacy of their past." Although he was barely out of his teens, Claude seems already to have been one such mysterious character. As it turned out, he had his reasons for anonymity.

Few people knew, and no one seems to have cared, that the reclusive boy had come from the East. Born in Virginia in 1950, he was reportedly raised in New York State with four brothers, one sister, and two half-sisters. After graduating from high school in 1968 Dallas headed west, possibly thinking he had left all authority behind.

It is said that one day he just showed up on the Alvord Ranch in southeastern Oregon, carrying his bedroll and a commemorative-edition rifle. There Claude got his first taste of cowboy life. With the money he earned in Oregon, the teen-ager purchased two horses and set off somewhat quixotically to explore the withered frontier. Eventually his wanderings led to the Paradise Valley region in northern Nevada, where he led a cowboy's life, worked harvest on potato farms, dug wells, and generally paid dues. During his first year with the Quarter Circle A outfit in Nevada, Dallas hand-filed a pair of spurs and made his own chaps.

"Anybody can go down and be a cowboy," explained Sheriff Nettleton. "Thirty days with this outfit, 30 days with that outfit. Normally you put five outfits under the belt and you've done something. This guy apparently worked for upwards of 20 or 30 of them. He earned a reputation for being a hard-working loner type. . .clean, neat, and polite."

In 1973 Claude's idyll was shattered. The FBI tracked him down and arrested him for failure to appear for military induction, Dallas blamed the photographs published in The American Cowboy for his arrest, although one FBI agent denied the book led the bureau to him. He was extradited to Columbus, Ohio, where his draft board was located. Later he told friends he had spent a month in custody in Columbus and was fined before being released.

"Claude had bad feelings toward the FBI," said Irene Fischer, who first met Dallas in 1970 when she was a cook with the Quarter Circle A outfit and he was a green, shy cowhand. "Claude's father said that the FBI had harassed that family for years," Irene remembered. "They wouldn't let it rest. They hunted him until they caught him. And when the man put him on the bus back to Nevada he told him, 'Claude, I'll get you, even if it's for income tax evasion.' " Whether the FBI did or did not harass the Dallas family, Claude clearly felt harassed.

Back in Nevada, Dallas resumed the hard, plain life from which he'd been yanked. Although he was capable of discoursing on the evils of the Vietnam War and a wide range of other topics, it was the West that most interested him. Fading arts such as braiding rawhide, bottle collecting, and reloading old cartridges appealed to him, and he was fond of the paintings of Charles M. Russell, particularly a lighthearted work entitled A Bronc to Breakfast.

Sometime around 1975 Dallas started teaching himself how to trap. In recent years, when pelts began to fetch prices in the hundreds of dollars, numerous ranchers and farmers have taken up trapping, though few have done better than break even. But for Dallas trapping was not just a hobby. He considered it a basic necessity for the life he wanted to live. According to older professionals like Santy Mendieta and Frank Aramburu, Basques who have been trapping for 40 and 60 years, respectively, Dallas was only an amateur trapper. Just the same, they say, he brought in respectable pelts.

MANY LAW OFFICERS between Boise and Winnemucca have expressed concern that Dallas might be lionized by the media. Some angrily deny it, but others allow that Claude Dallas cut quite a figure—at least on the face of things. The man was devoted to a life style celebrated in fiction and film, part cowboy and pan trapper. He lived clean and simple. As Sheriff Nettleton observed, "Outside of this one small quirk, he's the kind of guy you could respect." Because of that "one small quirk," what is alleged to have been his role in the murders, Dallas is one of the most wanted men in America.

In March 1976 Dallas was cited and fined for a trapping violation near Eureka, Nevada. It is said that after that incident he added game wardens to his list of aggravations headed by the FBI. He seemed to be more and more in the habit of quietly spurning the law. The traps he set around Bull Camp last January are one example of his civil disobedience. According to the wardens who pulled them, his traps were neither tagged for identification nor gapped for eagle protection, and they were baited. In addition, although Dallas had pur- chased a nonresident trapping license for the state of Idaho, he was at least four days premature in setting out his line.

"I hunt a lot," said Dr. James Calder, a Winnemucca dentist who regularly checked Dallas's teeth. "I've come across Claude out in the desert lots of times. He has camps all over this country. As well as I know him, I always got the cold shoulder when I met him in the desert. Probably why he didn't like you coming around was he always had a deer or something he had shot out of season in his camp. There's no secret about that. He either didn't want you to see what he had shot or he didn't want you to be implicated if he got in trouble for it. I don't know which. I do know Claude believed he had a right to kill animals out of season without regard for game laws."

In the winter of 1978-79, Nevada Department of Wildlife warden Gene Weller confiscated two guns from Dallas as well as traps he believed belonged to the trapper. The peculiar circumstances of that encounter underscore the cat-and-mouse game some hunters and trappers play with game wardens and vice versa. The scenario also places Dallas's alleged statements two years later at Bull Camp in illuminating context.

Late one afternoon, during a routine check of trap lines in a canyon of the Bloody Run Hills, Weller came across a number of baited— and therefore illegal—sets. Because of the location of the traps and the lateness of the hour, Weller decided against waiting for the owner of the traps; he instead confiscated them. The warden left his business card and a note stating why the traps had been seized and who to contact. Early the next morning, as Weller was returning to the canyon,

he saw a red jeep moving toward the canyon mouth. He parked his truck in an arroyo and waited until the driver had departed on foot up the canyon, then drove closer and prepared for a rare event—an arrest of a violator caught red-handed.

"I waited all day," Weller said. "I waited and waited. It was in the winter and the canyon was slipperier than all get-out, and I thought, finally. This guy has slipped and broken his leg. By then it was dark. I called for a sheriffs backup and got a couple of deputies.

"The three of us went up. One of the deputies checked the jeep and found a rifle. He told me it was loaded, with an unexpended [therefore illegal] round in the chamber. We went up the canyon.

"Well, I tracked him in the frozen snow, tracked him to the first trap site, and my business card, which I'd hung on a bait wire, was gone. At this point I circled around with a flashlight. There was another set of tracks coming down, but not on the trail. So 1 tracked these; finally the tracks went up a side hill and I lost the track. . . .1 later found out that he was in fact sitting on the mountain watching me watch for him. He was probably, chuckling the whole time. In retrospect, he could have blown me away at any time that day."

The three officers retreated to their vehicles, confiscated the rifle and a pistol from the jeep, and left. After a few days Dallas appeared at the county courthouse to claim the confiscated guns. He denied that the traps had been his or that the rifle had been loaded. Weller had no evidence that connected Dallas with the traps, and when the deputy who'd opened the rifle was questioned about it, he declined to swear under oath that the round had been a live one. Weller could do nothing but sign the guns over to Dallas. It may have been this incident that Dallas had in mind on January 5, when he allegedly informed Bill Pogue that he would deny the charges if taken to court.

There was another significant postscript to Weller's encounter with Dallas. He remembers, "[Claude] told me, 'You are welcome in my camp.' His camp was very important to him, I found out later. 'But,' he said, 'leave your badge outside.' And 1 told him, 'Claude, 1 can't leave my badge outside.' And he said, 'Well, don't come into my camp, then.'"

This sentiment may illustrate Dallas's distaste for authority, but it explains nothing about the greatest mystery of all: if Jim Stevens's eyewitness account is accurate, why did Dallas drive 70 miles out of the wilderness to dispose of Pogue's body? He had failed to haul the corpse of Conley Elms up to the rim and must have known that the body would not disappear in the waist-deep, slow-moving waters of the Owyhee. With his plan for hiding both bodies ruined, why would he then have driven back to civilization to bury Pogue?

Irene Fischer may have come close to explaining the mystery. "There's still this horrible feeling of why, what was Claude's idea to bring Pogue's body in here," she said. "He was so angry at Pogue that he was just going to make sure that man was never found."

WE'RE CALLED CONSERVATION officers," says Michael Elms. A stocky, bearded man, Elms knew both murder victims well—one was his "little brother" and the other "a very, very close friend." Had he not been ill the day before the shootings, Michael Elms would have been at Bull Camp instead of his brother. Jazz plays softly on his living room radio as he talks about his job. The books on his shelves include a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog and a multi-volume set of The Classics of Philosophy.

"We check hunters and fishermen, trespassers, rustlers. We do quite a bit of public speaking. We're on call for helping with different law enforcement agencies and whatever biological work the department wants us to do. Almost all of us have got at least bachelor of science degrees, quite a number have master's, and there's several Ph.D.'s walking around." Idaho conservation officers earn roughly (1600 per month, and each senior officer is responsible for some 1200 square miles of state, federal, and private land. Their mission is to manage a walking, eating, renewable resource—the stare's wildlife. Because of the nature of their responsibilities, conservation officers must deal with outdoorsmen, most of whom carry guns and a few of whom have no desire to see the law nosing around their campsites.

"We go out and find even fishermen carrying guns and big knives," Elms says. "It's sort of a Wild West syndrome. For example, we have an air force base down the road here [Mountain Home Air Force Base]. As soon as they hit the base some of the men go out and buy a gun, a big knife, and a couple of bandoleers and head out into the hills." One ten-year study conducted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department showed that a game warden has roughly seven times the chance or being shot at or threatened with a gun as a regular peace officer and almost nine times as great a chance of dying if assaulted.

Much of the job's danger stems from the marginal communications between officers and the distances that often separate wardens from one another. And yet the inherent danger does not appear to have caused any paranoia among Idaho's game wardens—even after the Bull Camp shootings. Dale Baird, chief of law enforcement in the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, explains, "Privately and around campfircs over the years, we've all said that sometime it's going to happen to one of us—just hope it isn't going to be me. So while [the double murder] was a shock, it wasn't a total surprise. You worry about these things, but you can't worry too much or you wouldn't go."

Conley Elms had Struggled for years to obtain his job with Idaho Fish and Game, working at odd jobs and as a part-time biological aide with the department until he was hired as a conservation officer in 1977. He and Michael had grown up on a small ranch near Beaver Marsh, Oregon (population 20 or less), and for four years before his murder Conley and his brother had shared the same occupation with great satisfaction. From all accounts Conley was a man at peace with himself. His main passion was a quiet one—fly fishing. At the time of his death at age 33, he and his wife, Sheryl, were in the final stage of adopting a baby from India.

Comments from various Idaho Fish and Game officers give the impression that Conley Elms was less likely to have been a party to a conflict with Dallas than Bill Pogue. This is not to say that Pogue was responsible for the alleged confrontation, but Elms was probably less threatening to Dallas.

"Bill Pogue was difficult to get to know," says Jerry Thiessen, big-game manager with Idaho Fish and Game and one of Pogue's closest friends. "It rook me six or eight years.... Bill and I would go down to Owyhee County and do what buddies do—look for arrowheads, cook a steak. We built a relationship and a rapport with Owyhee County. He was gentle, he was kind.

"But he had an air about himself that represented authority, even without his uniform on. He had little time for idle chitchat with people he didn't know well. I wouldn't say he was brusque, but he was sometimes short with people. Bill believed you shouldn't dillydally around. If you're not going to enforce the law, don't have the law."

Pogue was a lawman, and most people seern to remember him as such. Thiessen says, "When Bill walked up to you, there was no question in your mind that he represented the law." Pogue's stare, especially intense as the result of an accident to his right eye, made his presence keenly felt. "People remembered that he'd looked at them," says Thiessen. "There wasn't any way you were going to forget the man."

Dr. Calder agrees. "Bill was a tough law officer," he says, "but you've got to be tough around here. He was stern with poachers, people ripping off the wild game." But beneath Pogue's icy demeanor was a warm humor. Having spent part of his life in bunkhouses with cowboys and years as a student of the early mountain men, Pogue admired much the same western period and life Style that Dallas did. In 1964, when he first arrived in Garden Valley, Idaho, to take a job with Idaho Fish and Game, Pogue moved his family into a log cabin. His love of nature and regard for history surfaced most articulately in his artwork. He was a photographer who favored river otters and hummingbirds as subjects. But it was his sketches and paintings that most vividly revealed the inner man.

Pogue's personal favorite was entitled Mountain Man. In this drawing a bright-eyed, bearded character softly touches a single strand of barbed wire, gazing with innocent resignation at the near side of civilization. Inasmuch as Pogue himself accepted civilization and its restricting barbed wire, Mountain Man may have been a self-portrait of sons. It expresses a deeply felt sympathy for the trappers and frontier recluses who fell before the changing times. Except for the resignation in the mountain man's eyes, the drawing could also have been a portrait of Claude Dallas.

In the menagerie of characters Pogue drew, one figure resembles his alleged murderer more closely still. The Trapper depicts a fierce, bearded hunter straddling a dead wolf. Trap in one hand, walking stick in the other, the man in this drawing is clearly defiant, not resigned to the viewer's trespass. Drawn a year before the shootings, the work seems to have presaged the persona Pogue and Elms last encountered.

TO SOME IT WOULD seem that Claude Dallas is a man of almost legendary proportions. The stage is certainly set in his favor: his story brings elements of the western myth—wilderness, solitude, and violence—together. There have even been reports that some people applauded the murders. But Santy Mendieta summarizes a more general feeling among locals when he observes, "It's a sad thing. You can't make a hero out of either of them. What brought it about was that the one was going to drag the other into Boise, or wherever, handcuffed and hogtied. And the other man just wasn't going to go—and he didn't. From what I hear and from what I knew of them, they being the two men they were, [they] would have had the same trouble right out here on the street."

In Idaho capital punishment is now administered by lethal injection, and several law officers have expressed angry hope that Claude Dallas will be the first guinea pig for the new technique. The murders have torn holes in the lives of the victims' families and friends; they wait for the day of justice. But the questions raised by the tragedy have also caused deep anguish for Dallas's closest friends.

"These law boys had a chance to use what I call appropriate common sense," explains Cortland Nielsen, brother of George Nielsen. "They didn't have to push Claude. They could have told him in a right way that someone had reported him. People talk bad about him, but Claude wasn't the sort to waste deer meat."

Nielsen remembers Dallas back when he was a teen-ager beginning the horseback circuit of Nevada that led him. 11 years later, to Bull Camp on the Owyhee. He searches for some negative quality in the boy he watched grow into a man, something that might demonstrate that, even at his worst, Dallas was better than most.

"The only thing wrong with him," he says, pausing, "he let his hair grow. But in this book here, the Bible, it says that long hair is a woman's beauty and it's filth on a man. I told him so, too." Nielsen drops into silence and gropes for a different thought. Almost wish- fully he suddenly booms, "I'm confident Claude is traveling around the world and getting along fine." He falters. "Bur then he's got a conscience, too. So finally it'll hit him too much someday. Then he'll figure a way to get lost and that'll be the end. No one will ever see him again." Nielsen stops, disturbed by the idea he has just ex- pressed. Outside his window enormous winds rip at the topsoil of the solitary ranches perched up and down the valley.

"The only way that he could ever get back, that people will ever see him again, would be if the people [the law] let it be known that. ..that. . .but, see... you can't excuse, you can't. . .it's so tough." At last he concludes, "I just don't know how to call it. I wrote a letter to Norman Vincent Peale to find out right from wrong, what should be done if I ever see Claude, say in Portland or Calcutta next Sunday, other than tell him to pray or turn himself in. I don't know. It's really tough."

Not far down the road from Nielsen lives Dallas's old friend, Irene Fischer. The winter she and Claude worked the Circle A together, Irene and her husband, Walt, gave the lone boy presents and a Christmas meal when all the other hands had departed for the holiday. Now she mourns Claude, almost as if he were a dead younger brother. Her scrapbook contains some of the few photographs in which Dallas ever appeared, and pictures taken for The American Cowboy hang in her home.

During the past few months Fischer has sketched an exquisite fantasy of the moment of the alleged murders. Behind Dallas is a hazy rendition of a western saloon. Buildings and skyscrapers, the urban landscape Dallas repudiated, loom even deeper in the background, tucked in some narrow alley of the trapper's psyche. The romanticized periphery is balanced by the event taking place in the work and the realism of the desert floor in the foreground. In the sketch Dallas is shooting a lawman. Such is the nightmare within the dream.

"I'm very sorry for what he done," Fischer says, "sorry because we'll never see him again. I hope he never gets caught for the simple reason I don't think Claude will ever be taken alive. I wouldn't want him to kill anyone else, and I wouldn't want them to kill him. And I wouldn't want him to end up killing himself. He did make a remark to a friend that if he was caught he'd shoot it out, and that if it got down to his last shell he'd shoot himself before he'd be taken."

That sentiment is less painful to her than another, more personal one, though. Despite her anger at the law for its determined pursuit of Claude Dallas, Fischer has had to compose her own answer to a question that haunts her: what would she have done if this friend of years had arrived at her house with the blood of two dead men on him?

"I've laid awake at night and thought about it," she sighs. "Claude was a dear friend, and I've really had to look inside myself. And I honestly believe that I would have been in my right mind. . .I'm so dead set against. . ." She halts and would rather not say it. "I couldn't have helped Claude. . . .His destiny is in the hands of God now."

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n the whole world's sustenance, at some dated, our inner fire goes out. It is then bust into passion at hand an encounter with another magnanimous being. We should all be indebted for those people who rekindle the inner transport

In the whole world's time, at some time, our inner pep goes out. It is then blow up into flame beside an face with another hominoid being. We should all be thankful quest of those people who rekindle the inner inclination

As your faith is strengthened you make declare that there is no longer the emergency to have a sense of repress, that things will stream as they will, and that you will bubble with them, to your monstrous delight and benefit.